I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

The QoC Interview: Luke Wroblewski, Author of "Mobile First"

This interview was conducted with Luke Wroblewski on December 20, 2011. Luke is the author of Mobile Firstand describes himself (on twitter) as a “Digital product design & strategy guy in Silicon Valley, CA. Known for Mobile First, Bagcheck, Web Form Design, & more…” I was talking to him in the context of a piece about the ESPN mobile web site that he had featured prominently in Mobile First.

AK You wrote about a presentation by Mike Krieger of Instagram at the Warm Gun conference in San Francisco (Warm Gun: Lightning-Fast Mobile Design) where Krieger said that, “Mobile experiences fill the gaps while we wait. Nobody wants to wait while they wait. Mobile needs to be fast. To make things on mobile feel really fast you need to invest in back-end and front-end design–in design and engineering. Design can be a speed feature.” How much is speed part of the quality of mobile web experiences in general and for a site like ESPN in particular?

LW I think it’s big for any site. There’s study after study done by companies like AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft that show 100 ms delays in loading web pages on a desktop, where generally networks are much less spotty than they are on mobile, can cost them significant amounts of revenue, can degrade user engagement, can result in less overall traffic, you name it. There are multiple compilations of these kind of studies. In fact Google even did one where they dropped performance on search for people and then they brought it back. And even three weeks after they brought back performance to the level they had had it, they saw people engaging less with the product. So performance has long term residual effects too.

AKIt’s more intuitive than anything else…

LW A lot of it’s perception, I think that’s one of the things in the Instagram article you’re referencing, is that they’re doing a lot of things while you’re not aware you’re waiting, so that you don’t have to wait when you are aware of it. It’s not like they made uploading any faster. It still takes the same amount of time to upload a photo. It’s Just they start it way at the beginning and then you’re busy doing other stuff, and by the time you realize that you’re gonna wait, it’s already done. Very ingenious.

AKWhen laymen talk about web design they tend to think only about the visual part. But in terms of what you engage with when you help people with sites, what’s the breakdown of the visual versus the kind of engineering that you’re talking about for instance with Instagram?

LW Well, it’s all the product. If your service is digital, than every component of it is the product. It goes much deeper than the engineering and the visual design, even the text that the lawyers write has a place, right? Let’s say you have a site that has a signup form and there’s this onerous terms of service, with a check box to agree to everything, that’s imposed by the legal team. That has an overall impact on the product and it plays to people’s complete perception of what it is. It can be beautiful, it can be fast, but as soon as they start asking for things on signups—let’s say the marketing department wants to know how much money you make, when you were born, if you’re male/female so they can have demographic information—all that visual design and nice technical development can be out the door because this stuff ends up being a roadblock for people signing up. You have to look at the complete picture. You can’t say let’s just look at the visuals, let’s just look at the development, every factor contributes to the overall experience.

AKSo it’s like the weakest link…

LW Well, it depends how much spotlight you shine on that weakest link, right? If that weakest link is front and center it’s a bigger issue than if it’s hidden in a back closet that maybe one or two people open.

AKThere was a story last week, a recommendation that all the states ban cell phone use while driving. Even though common sense would argue for that, the studies they’ve done have shown that laws about avoiding cell phone use while driving have not reduced accidents. This might have to do with enforcement or it could be that people are driving distracted even when they are not on the phone. Do you think people have adopted a mobile mindset even when they’re using a desktop browser now?

LW Two things there, studies that I’ve seen on the effect of drunk driving show that if you’re driving a car and you’re intoxicated your performance actually doesn’t go down that much until you hit a critical level of drunkenness. But your performance completely degrades if you’re driving, have had a little to drink AND are on the phone. Or you’re driving, had a little bit to drink and are futzing with the radio, then your performance plummets completely. We’re generally OK with two things at a time, but when you throw three things into the mix, things collapse. And I’m not advocating that it’s OK to text and drive or anything like that but there are situations with the phone for that two rule, like you’re playing with the radio and you’re driving. Most people are OK with that. We don’t have laws against that. Or you’re driving down the street and your talking on the phone through a bluetooth speaker. Out here in California we have a hands free law that makes that OK. And if you actually have voice control on your phone like with an Android or an iPhone 4S you can do that through a bluetooth and basically control the phone through your voice.

Now about people demanding the mobile experience on the desktop, I hear it over and over again, “The mobile site is so simple, I wish the desktop site was that easy.” And I hear that from the CEOs of big companies out here that they’ve gone through the process of developing a mobile app or a mobile website and they see their service boiled down to its core essence through the constraints of mobile because there’s small screen size, there’s low bandwidth. You sort of have to cut it out, cut it out, cut it out until just the important stuff is left. And they see that raw experience and they say that’s what we’re all about, that’s what we should be doing everywhere. So I think it’s a great forcing function for organizations and companies to come to terms with what really matters.

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